1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to data management, and more particularly relate to convergence of customer and internal assets.
2. Description of the Related Art
A centralized data repository and work management solution is a collection of software and/or hardware components that enables a business or enterprise to maintain a single, “master” source of data describing the physical attributes of assets in the business or enterprise that is accessible across multiple, heterogeneous information management systems and subsystems. Currently, software vendors such as Oracle Corporation and IBM offer two types of data management solutions for assets: a customer relationship management (CRM) solution and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. These solutions are based on the ownership of the asset, where the CRM solution provides a centralized view of customer-owned assets and where the ERP solution provides a view of enterprise-owned assets. However, the software industry has thus far failed to provide a solution for centrally defining and managing the intersection of assets between CRM and ERP products.
The creation of a centralized definition of assets has become increasingly important in recent years as companies have started performing both customer-related business functions (e.g., product service, sales, etc.) as well as enterprise asset management (e.g., maintenance, operational requirements, etc.). In many instances, these companies are forced to invest in two separate systems, a CRM system for servicing and an ERP system for maintenance. These two system effectively perform the same functions but are distinguished based on ownership of the asset. For example, an electric utility company owns their own assets, such as transmission lines and the poles on which the transmission lines are mounted. There are also the assets owned by customers of the utility company, such as meters residing within the domestic abode. In order for the electric utility provider to manage both the company-owned assets and the customer-owned assets, the traditional solution was to invest in both CRM and ERP solutions. The customer service-oriented CRM application would track the customer-owned meters and billing, whereas the ERP system may track the internally-owned assets including the transmission lines and transformers. An exemplary ERP system is Oracle® Enterprise Asset Management (eAM). Both systems perform the same work flow functions—maintaining and tracking assets. A system which addresses the redundancies within the CRM and eAM systems would be more efficient than purchasing and operating two disparate systems.
To address the foregoing needs, prior solutions that recognize both customer-owned assets and enterprise/internal assets have attempted to integrate one system with another. This usually involves extracting the asset data from the separate CRM and eAM systems and forming an assimilated asset definition. However, this does not eliminate the data redundancy. The customer-owned asset and internal asset definitions continue to be persisted in the separate systems. Moreover, prior solutions leverage pre-existing business flows, which require the asset data on the separate systems to be synchronized during the flow of work execution. Furthermore, these types of solutions are generally created by third-party consulting services and are not out-of-the-box solutions. Thus, this approach is problematic for several reasons. First, it is inefficient because it doubles the amount of processing and memory resources required to maintain a single set of data (i.e., the asset data). Second, it is cumbersome because it requires synchronization of the extracted asset data with the CRM master data and the eAM master data on a periodic basis. Even with frequent synchronizations, there may be situations where the extracted data is stale, possibly leading to processing errors and a degraded quality of service to customers.
Another solution is to integrate customer-owned assets and internal assets within an e-business suite of applications. The usual solution is to combine the asset definitions from both systems into a single definition. This means the physical and financial definitions are combined. However, this solution is also problematic. It is cumbersome because financial systems do not need to recognize assets in the same way as non-financial systems. For example, an accounting system may represent ten laptop computers as a single entry, with a quantity of ten units, and may depreciate the single entry on the group of ten assets. On the other hand, the physical representation may include ten separate entries. With a combined asset definition, the accounting system must then depreciate each entry separately.
Moreover, where subsystems are not bundled in a suite of applications, inefficiencies are prevalent. Each subsystem is tightly coupled to its own work management module. However, the separate work management modules perform the same functions and tasks. It would be more efficient to have a single work management module in order to eliminate the redundancies.